Plot:
Contemporary Earth; the TARDIS team have split up across the globe to investigate odd energy emissions, birds behaving strangely, and people going all crusty and exploding after coming into contact with a mystery alien pathogen. In Madagascar, the Doctor meets up with a couple of people working in a research lab, Suki and Amaru. In Peru, Ryan teams up with a travel vlogger Gabriella, who's lost her friend to the alien nastiness. Meanwhile, Graham and Yaz are in Hong Kong, and bump into Jake, the estranged husband of missing astronaut Adam Lang, who is searching for him there. Together, they break into a building and find Adam, who's been experimented on by aliens, having been infected. The Doctor collects everyone together, and - avoiding attacks by aliens or by infected birds - they use the Madagascan lab to work. Amaru gets killed by the birds, and Suki turns out to be the last of the aliens who deliberately brought the pathogen to Earth to find a cure. They chose Earth because the infection has an affinity for microplastics, and the humans and the birds have ingested loads because - see - microplastics, environment - bad - see. See, kids? Bad. Anyway, Suki succumbs to the infection and dies. The Doctor works out a cure and Jake offers to sacrifice himself using the aliens' spaceship to spray it all over Earth, but the Doctor rescues him in the nick of time and he's reconciled with Adam.
Context:
Context:
In the first full week of May, after a long while with no new Doctor Who releases, two box-sets - like buses - came along at once. The first was the coveted Season 14 Blu-ray set, Tom Baker's excellent third year. I already blogged about The Talons of Weng-Chiang after seeing it at the BFI, just before Covid-19 lockdown kicked in for the UK, but it's great to finally have the full set of discs to enjoy. Also out, perhaps not as coveted but just as welcome, was the box-set of the recent Jodie Whittaker run, new Who's series 12. This type of set doesn't get a BFI launch (but wouldn't it be good to have such a thing to celebrate Jodie Whittaker's stories, if and when we can leave our houses again?). In order to choose which story to blog about, I introduced a random factor with the roll of an eight-sided die. A roll of 1 would have meant Spyfall, which I already blogged when it was transmitted, and so would have meant that I didn't blog another tale from the series this time. But it came up 6, so a speedy revisit of Praxeus was on the cards. I watched it by myself this time (the family are separately watching a different story an episode a week at the moment). At one point, my youngest (girl of 8) came in and said "We've seen this already" and then left the room again.First time round:
Reaction:
The first thing that hits one on watching Praxeus is how good it looks. From the very first frame, and throughout the action, the images captured by the lovely anamorphic lenses they've been using on Who stories since 2018 dazzle; every shot is widescreen and cinematic and beautiful. It also helps that there are some great locations, a lot of them shot in South Africa but chosen and no doubt dressed cleverly to seem diverse enough to represent locations all across the world. At first glance, it's essential to have this sense of scale, as this is a global story. Or is it? There's atmosphere and scale in some of the scenes - a doomed submariner washed up on the shore here, a creepy abandoned hospital there - but they don't add anything much. Underneath all the latitude hopping, this is a very linear plot: the Doctor and friends discover an illness, then find and distribute a cure. There's a brief betrayal, yes, when a character we thought was friendly turns out to have an ulterior motive; but, as the person turns to dust a few moments later, the betrayal doesn't make much of a difference either. The subplot of Jake and Adam's reconciliation is pretty thin too, and added up only takes a few minutes to play out. Gabriela has no impact on the plot at all; she could lift right out - as could, truth be told, all of the companions and guest characters - and nothing would change. Even Suki and the others from her alien race could be removed; just leaving the Doctor and the bacterium.
It is a story with a strong moral message about the pollution caused by plastic use, and that's perfectly fine. Maybe the global scale is needed for that subtext, as it is referring to a global problem? Nah, I'm not buying that either. The whole point about the plastics ingested by bird and human alike is their ubiquity, so the tale could have been based anywhere. If the hospital, lab and warehouse that each different sub-team investigates were all in the same city, it would still be the same story and the same message. Spreading it out just creates "shoe leather", i.e. moving characters from place to place to take up time. Ultimately, the story has to cross-cut between different characters and places. If it didn't, there would be no story, and without the scale, and the tonal shifts from comedy to adventure to horror, the audience would lose patience with it very quickly. Actually, maybe that's not true. If the story was distilled down to its essence, just the Doctor in a lab investigating a pathogen, racing against time to save the human race as the infected die one by one, if the action never left the confines of the lab, that kind of monomaniac focus would be thrilling, and certainly more original, than all the globe-trotting here that is a product of budget, but not necessarily imagination.
It's a shame, because the writer of this story Pete McTighe scripted one of the better stories of 2018, Kerblam! That story had loads of plot, carefully written, nicely paced and delivered, and had no superfluous characters or scenes. He also seems like a very nice guy, from his appearances in front of and behind the cameras on the classic Doctor Who Blu-ray sets, with which he's heavily involved. So, what happened? I think the cart was before the horse, here. My guess is that the brief was for a global eco-thriller, and everyone got carried away with that concept, and saying something meaningful about the world around us, but didn't remember to build a story to underpin that. The upshot is that it's a bit ho-hum, and wears thin with repeat watching. If it were a better story, people would watch it more and it would endure into the future, so the message would better resonate. It's a little self-defeating.
That's not to say there aren't pleasures.The look and feel is a big plus, as mentioned before. The comedy and adventure and horror, even though they are basically misdirection, are all done well. Bradley Walsh is having the time of his life being the joker in the pack (getting his tricorder-like tool the wrong way round, and such), but also able to turn on a sixpence to act as the heart of the TARDIS team, providing marriage counselling to Jake and Adam. There's lots of great action scenes, with cops and robbers stuff early on, alien zap gun fights, and spacecraft in trouble, burning through the atmosphere. Yaz finally gets some stuff to do, leaping into the unknown bravely at one point, then being disappointed when she hasn't discovered a new alien planet. The horror succeeds both in the creeping fear variety as characters explore eerie locales, and the gruesome body horror of the infection consuming people too. It's by no means just "for the birds", but it's also not going to be on many people's top ten list.
Connectivity:
It is a story with a strong moral message about the pollution caused by plastic use, and that's perfectly fine. Maybe the global scale is needed for that subtext, as it is referring to a global problem? Nah, I'm not buying that either. The whole point about the plastics ingested by bird and human alike is their ubiquity, so the tale could have been based anywhere. If the hospital, lab and warehouse that each different sub-team investigates were all in the same city, it would still be the same story and the same message. Spreading it out just creates "shoe leather", i.e. moving characters from place to place to take up time. Ultimately, the story has to cross-cut between different characters and places. If it didn't, there would be no story, and without the scale, and the tonal shifts from comedy to adventure to horror, the audience would lose patience with it very quickly. Actually, maybe that's not true. If the story was distilled down to its essence, just the Doctor in a lab investigating a pathogen, racing against time to save the human race as the infected die one by one, if the action never left the confines of the lab, that kind of monomaniac focus would be thrilling, and certainly more original, than all the globe-trotting here that is a product of budget, but not necessarily imagination.
It's a shame, because the writer of this story Pete McTighe scripted one of the better stories of 2018, Kerblam! That story had loads of plot, carefully written, nicely paced and delivered, and had no superfluous characters or scenes. He also seems like a very nice guy, from his appearances in front of and behind the cameras on the classic Doctor Who Blu-ray sets, with which he's heavily involved. So, what happened? I think the cart was before the horse, here. My guess is that the brief was for a global eco-thriller, and everyone got carried away with that concept, and saying something meaningful about the world around us, but didn't remember to build a story to underpin that. The upshot is that it's a bit ho-hum, and wears thin with repeat watching. If it were a better story, people would watch it more and it would endure into the future, so the message would better resonate. It's a little self-defeating.
Connectivity:
Both are single word title stories proximate to big revelatory episodes featuring Captain Jack, in seasons where the overarching plot involves the Master (Praxeus was broadcast a week after Fugitive of the Judoon, Blink a week before Utopia). Both stories have a love story subplot between two guest characters, and both see a few guest characters inside the TARDIS control room.
Deeper Thoughts:
"If you have a message, call Western Union." The late great Terrance Dicks used to occasionally bring up this famous quotation, often (mis?)attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, which warns off the storyteller from attempting to moralise. It's odd that Dicks was the one Doctor Who writer who quoted this frequently, as the era when he was script editor - the 5 years where Jon Pertwee played the Doctor - were probably the most preachy of Who's long history. Stories like Praxeus, which use the Doctor Who format to highlight a topical issue, are very similar in intent to a Pertwee story like The Green Death, for example. This was pointed out during arguments back and forth online this year after this story, and other 'message' stories of 2020 like Can You Hear Me?, were aired. A lot of fans moaned that all this "woke" nonsense was not what Doctor Who was supposed to about, and it should concentrate on just telling simple adventure tales like it always had. Many other fans countered that Doctor Who had never just told simple adventure tales, and it had always included socially relevant themes and subtexts. This argument has flared up intermittently for years, and will likely never end, as both sides are right.Doctor Who is a conflicted as its fans regarding this; it has a love/hate relationship with conveying a message. The years before Dicks joined as script editor were at the other polar extreme to his era. All Pertwee's predecessor Patrick Troughton's stories are adventure stories of greater or lesser quality, but does any of them have any intentional subtext at all? What message does The Web of Fear have? What about The Tomb of the Cybermen? Does Fury from the Deep have any higher intent? This last story concentrates on offshore rigs not because of their social or ecological impacts, but because North Sea Oil had been newsworthy fairly recently when it was written, and so must have seemed a fun inspiration for the locale in which a seaweed monster might operate. Earlier than that, the Hartnell era oscillates even more wildly, as the show was finding it's feet back then. Early on in the very first series, Terry Nation contributes the first Dalek story, and it's a full-on cold war fable, with a central discussion about the merits or otherwise of pacifism. A couple of stories later, Nation is recommissioned, and delivers The Keys of Marinus, which has frozen ice warriors coming to life, seas of acid, brain creatures in jars, and nary a hint of a social conscience.
When Pertwee (and Dicks) bowed out it, the Doctor Who style swung back to adventures without subtext again, and it's gone back and forth like a metronome ever since. When it's good, the extra depth added by a real-world theme can be very rewarding. When it's done clumsily it can be excruciating, the action clunking to a halt for the star to deliver a homily with all the subtlety of a needle being wrenched off a record. Invasion of the Dinosaurs is my pick for the most egregious example. Throughout the piece there's been some clever commentary about the dangers of herd mentality, and how well-intentioned people can end up doing atrocious things. But towards the end, there's this unsubtle exchange to hammer things home to those who might not have been paying attention:DOCTOR: It's not the the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier - it's simply greed.
BRIGADIER: (Looking embarrassed) Hmm... Well... (changes subject rapidly).
Praxeus is somewhere in the middle of the scale, not too bad, not too good. Elsewhere in the 2020 run, global warming and mental health were smuggled in, but other weeks it was just Cybermen dressing up as Time Lords and zapping everyone in sight. It's testament to Doctor Who's ever-evolving structure that even episodes shown after it's been going 56+ years are defying anyone, even the fans, to box it in to a simple style or approach.
In Summary:
This story didn't quite go viral.
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